Wars in Europe amounted to organized gang fights sponsored by the royal houses of the various countries until roughly 100 years ago with the exception of the crusades which were in fact provoked by vicious treatment of Christians in the holy land. The only things resembling major modern wars in all that time were the wars of Chengis Khan and those were motivated by greed and a kind of a Nietzschian will to power; Chengis Khan, Subudai, Jebe, Muhuli et. al. basically did not give a rat's A$$ for religion or religiously motivated wars.
And then, starting in the middle of the 1800's you get this secular-humanistic atheistic pseudoscientific ideological doctrine called evolution and the two major isms which that doctrine spawned, communism and naziism, and you get two wars separated by twenty years which outdo all of Chengis Khan's wars for pure butchery and which totally dwarf anything ever seen in the Christian or Islamic worlds prior to that.
I mean, there's no comparison at all; the worst the Christian world ever had to offer, e.g. the Spanish inquisition or the crushing of the Albigensians was paradise compared to that.
Now, if you want to talk about the age of the Old Testament, fine, but that takes a lot of study to try to get any sort of a handle on. Basically, in those days, you had entire nations hearing inner voices and powerless to disobey the commands OF those inner voices, and today we get a case like that once in a blue moon (e.g. the David Berkowicz story) and call it schizophrenia when we do, but it turns out that what we call schizophrenia was NORMAL 3000 years ago and that's a long story.
Ancient literature described a number of things which we do not see in our present world, including:
- Cosmic-scale catastrophes such as the flood in Noah's time, the catastrophe at the time of Exodus, the meteorite storms of Joshua's day:
JOS 10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.
etc. In other words, the kinds of things Velikovsky wrote about. - Astral religion. The association between planetary bodies and the major gods of antique religions was primordial.
- Electrostatic components of ancient religious practices. It turns out, that electrostatic phenomena in the very recent past on our planet were significantly more of a factor and a thing to be contended with than they are now.
- An antique and radically different paradigm for the use of the human brain and mind, and a number of phenomena, including idolatry, prophecy, and oracles, which went hand in hand with that different paradigm.
Hypnotism and schizophrenia, which still exist, are also remnants of the antique paradigm for the use of the human mind.
Prophesy originally involved a trance state, and the prophet attempting to join his mind to that of God in order to know God's intentions, or what he would have us do. The OT prophets speak of "visions", and prophets of a somewhat later time came to be like the Greek oracles in that they did not recall what they had said during the trance. Seeing into the future was a fringe benefit of joining ones mind to the mind of God, presumably since God exists outside our notion of time, but was not the main point of the whole deal.
There is no essential claim of prophesy in Christianity. Christianity in its most basic sense amounts to a claim that God came to this Earth in the person of Christ, to instruct men in proper conduct. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Christianity marks a turning away from older religious practices, based upon things like oracles, prophets, idolatry etc. etc., and amounts to a more rational basis for religion.
There are two starting points for understanding this ancient paradigm of the human mind. One is a curious book titled "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by a psychology professor at Princeton named Julian Jaynes. Nobody can easily remember a title like that but if you tell the folks at Borders or Barnes/Noble that you need a copy of Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness", they'll get one for you. The second starting point is a series of pamphlets written by Al DeGrazia and Hugh Crossthwaite on the general topic of electrostatic phenomena in ancient times, and the role they played in antique religious practices. Those works I have in PDF form on my own site Click here to download from Bearfabrique. The two, taken together, tell a story.
Jaynes was a classicist and, reading through numerous ancient sources, began to notice the curious absence of decision making which you observe in the Illiad and in basically everything prior to it, i.e. the fact that at every point at which you or I would have to stop to consider how to proceed, the people in these ancient narratives are being told precisely what to do by inner voices, which are described as Gods and godesses.
It began to dawn on Jaynes that what we would call schizophrenia today, hearing voices, was the normal state of affairs in ancient times. He also noticed, in odd places such as Assyrian bass reliefs, references to a particular point in time at which these voices ceased, people were left to their own devices, and the gods and godesses which had formerly guided humanity vanished, so that an Assyrian sculpture might show a king pointing to an empty thrown which his god had vacated:
There are two kinds of crime in the Old Testament, i.e. minor crime such as rape, robbery, and murder, and then your really bad, serious crime such as making up little dolls and idols to worship. Jaynes noted the big, hypnotic eyes which these idols seem to have more often than not:
and it occurred to him that something a lot more serious than just some sort of archaic pop culture was going on. Could it possibly be that these people were really hearing voices emanating from these idols? Not only does that turn out to be the case, but it also turns out that a voice which is inside somebody's head cannot easily be disobeyed, hence such primordial formulations as "to hear and obey" in English, or the verb to obey being a reflexive form of the verb to hear in Russian (slushats/slushatcya).
Now, fighting wars and sacraficing children at the behest of wooden idols is not a formula for success in life and, it is for this reason, i.e. the fact that the tendency to idolatry turned the world into an insane assylum for the thousand or so year period between the flood and the time of the Trojan war, that idolatry is viewed as the ultimate crime in the Old Testament, and the first commandment reads as it does.
I assume that at this point, Jaynes, working at a large university, went to the people in neurophysiology and asked them what, if anything could there be in the human brain which would cause people to hear voices.
What they told him was that there is an area on the right side of the human brain which appears to be an analog to the speech center (Wernicke area) on the left side, and a bridge cropssover between the two. This right side analog appears to be like the human appendix and serves no known purpose; nonetheless, when this right side analog to the Wernicke area is stimulated with electrical probes in experiments, subjects more often than not claim to be hearing voices, as real as if you or I were speaking to them.
Jaynes naturally enough surmised that this right side analog area had been in regular use during biblical times, hence his use of the word 'bicameral' to represent the "two chambered" nature of the human mind in antique times.
Now, Jaynes assumed a purely evolutionary model and assumed that all of the phenomena which he described were "auditory hallucinations", and that mankind had simply evolved into a state in which human societies were governed by a well-ordered system of such auditory hallucinations. That is clearly unworkable, since 200 people in a village heeding inner voices would amount to 200 Sons of Sam walking around. To the extent that evolution ever works at all (microevolution) it works by favoring progressively greater levels of functionality. You cannot evolve INTO a disfunctional state, and the world of the Old Testament was intensely disfunctional. Jaynes did not investigate the following possibility: that in an age just prior to the age he studied, i.e. the true antediluvian age, the kinds of phenomena he describes might have amounted to a normal and functional means of communication, and that what we note in most of the OT descriptions are vestiges of a system in an ongoing state of breakdown.
In fact, the word "prophet" only occurs once in Genesis (20:7)in the story of Abraham, which was after the flood. There were no prophets before the flood nor were any needed; men could communicate with the spirit world directly.
That is one problem with Jaynes' analysis. The other is that he does not offer any sort of a believable rationale for the breakdwn of the bicameral system, and the development of the individualized consciousness which we experience today. He vaguely ascribes these massive changes to changing social and cultural conditions, which is not credible simply because the change he describes is an overwhelming biological change. He is claiming that the entire manner in which the human mind and brain are used has totally changed over a period of just a few thousand years and he backs that claim up with massive scholarship.
This is where the works of DeGrazia and Crossthwaite which I mentioned above come in. DeGrazia and Crossthwaite heavily document the fact that many of these phenomena which Jaynes describes as bicameral were also electrostatic phenomena, and you don't really need to be Albert Einstein to put two and two together for four. The basic reality is that the electrostatic nature of the planet itself, vastly stronger just a few thousand years ago than it is now, ENABLED the bicameral phenomena and that, as this archaic electrostatic field broke down, the bicameral phenomena broke down with it and died out.
DeGrazia and Crossthwaite note that the pyramids were basically huge lightning rods, the conductive golden tips of which glowed eternally, the root of the Greek word 'pyramid' being the same 'pyr' which we note in 'pyrotechnics' or 'pyromania', i.e. 'fire'. The ark of the covenant amounted to an exercise in miniaturization of such religious electrotechnics, i.e. a leydon bottle or primitive capacitor, the two golden "cherubims" being electrical conductors:
EXO 37:7 And he made two cherubims of gold, beaten out of one piece made he them, on the two ends of the mercy seat;EXO 37:8 One cherub on the end on this side, and another cherub on the other end on that side: out of the mercy seat made he the cherubims on the two ends thereof.
And then we read things like:
2SA 6:2 And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the LORD of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.
from which it is pretty obvious what these people were looking at (i.e. what do you see between the two terminals of a capacitor?).
This doe not mean that Moses, Joshua, Solomon, David and all those people were a bunch of ignorant rednecks worshipping an electrical arc; it DOES mean that communication with the spirit world at that time was getting harder. Again, there is no mention of anything like this in Genesis because there was no need for it, particularly before the flood, when communication with the spirit world was believed to be natural and freely available to any and all.
All of these phenomena in fact were associated with static electricity. Hugh Crossthwaite documents the manner in which Greek oracles were located in areas of heightened electrostatic charge (making the job of oracle a somewhat dangerous one):
"Good electrical effects could be obtained on high ground, e.g. Parnassus, Cithaeron, Mount Sinai, etc.. Cithaeron, as well as being the scene of The Bacchae, had below it the town of Erythrae. There is another Erythrae in Asia Minor. Clefts in rock if possible combined with water, as at Delphi, would be helpful. Homer speaks of "rocky Pytho." Such places, together with oak groves, as at Dodona, were likely to be enelysioi, containing Zeus Kataibates, Zeus the sky god who descends in a thunderbolt. One may compare the mysterious flame that burned in Thebes on the tomb of Semele, mother of Dionysus, killed by a thunderbolt from Zeus, and also the fire round the head which did not burn [7]."
Starting around page 300 or so of Origins, Julian Jaynes documents the manner in which all of these kinds of phenomena became progressively more difficult to accomplish and finally broke down. The inner voices first became inconsistent from person to person, and then inconsistent in the mind of the same person, the information obtained from such practices became totally unreliable, and finally people who kept on trying to use their minds this way began to be viewed as we view the occassional throwback like Son of Sam now, i.e. as lunatics, so that the Old Testament is replete with stories of some judge or king driving large numbers of them out of the country or killing them:
SA1 28:3 Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him, and buried him in Ramah, even in his own city. And Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land.1KI 18:4 For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)
1KI 18:40 And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
and, at long last, we read Zechariah describing prophets as unclean spirits, categorizing them as part and parcel of the same thing as idolatry, and advocating that parents kill children who use their minds this way:
ZEC 13:2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.ZEC 13:3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.
ZEC 13:4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive:
Lisa Beth Liel, a very serious scholar and expert in Hebrew language and biblical antiquities, informs me that at the time of Zechariah, the Jewish council asked the Lord to lift the curse of idolatry from the world and that he did, but that they lost prophecy at the same time. I interpret this to mean that, with the final breakdown of the antique electrostatic fields, all such phenomena finally vanished.
All of that was several hundred years before Christ. and amounts to the single great contribution which Israel made to the world, which was the throwing off of bicameral and idolatrous religion.
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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.